Saints
“Jerome of Stridon”
Translator of the Scriptures · Ascetic of Bethlehem
The most learned scholar of the Latin Fathers, who left Rome for a cave beside the place of the Nativity and spent his life among the languages of Scripture. He translated the Bible into Latin from the Hebrew and the Greek, and his commentaries carried the exegesis of the Greek Fathers west.
His life
Jerome was born about the year 347 at Stridon, on the border of Dalmatia, and was educated at Rome in grammar and rhetoric. After his baptism he travelled east, lived for a time as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis, and there set himself to learn Hebrew, which almost no Christian of the West then read.
At Rome he served as secretary to Pope Damasus, who set him to revising the Latin Gospels. Around him gathered a circle of noble Roman women drawn to the ascetic life, and his direction of them, and his sharp tongue against the worldliness of the city's clergy, made him enemies enough that he left Rome for good.
He settled at Bethlehem about the year 386 and remained there the rest of his life, in a monastery beside the cave of the Nativity. There he completed the translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew, judging that the Church should have the truth of the original tongue, and wrote commentaries on the prophets, on Matthew, and on several of the epistles.
He reposed at Bethlehem about the year 420. He was a difficult man and knew it, quarrelling with Rufinus and with Augustine by letter, but no one in the Latin West equalled his knowledge of the Scriptures in their own languages. The Orthodox Church keeps his memory on the fifteenth of June.
Writings
c. 375
Written in the Syrian desert, about 375
Jerome's answer to the question of who went into the desert first. He gives it to Paulus rather than to Antony, and tells of the raven that brought bread, the two lions that dug the grave, and the palm-leaf tunic Jerome says he would sooner have than the purple of kings.
Open work →
c. 390
The hermit who carried the desert into Palestine
Hilarion heard Antony in Egypt and took that life home to Gaza, and the solitary life in Palestine begins with him. The longest of the three Lives, and the one most crowded with the ordinary people who came looking for him.
Open work →
c. 391
Told to Jerome by the man himself
An old man Jerome met in Syria, who had left his monastery, been taken by raiders on the road, and kept his continence through slavery and a forced marriage. Jerome sets it down as he was told it, to show that virtue can be held captive and not conquered.
Open work →
c. 383
Against Helvidius, about 383
The treatise that settled the question in the West: that the brethren of the Lord are His kinsmen, that the Mother of God remained ever-virgin, and that Joseph was her guardian and not her husband in fact. Sharp in tone, as Jerome usually is, and its conclusion is what the Church confesses.
Open work →
Holy St. Jerome, pray to God for us.